"Sex, Gender and Cyberspace"

Sue-Ellen Case

The purpose of this talk is to begin to describe the interplay between discourses around gender and sexuality and the foundation of a new transnational arena. The talk moves in two major directions: toward liberative discourses that have found new energy and strength in web encounters and toward transnational organization and corporate strategies that use sexuality and gender to establish the foundation of their territorialization, or deterritorialization.

Familiar terms such as "being connected," "linked-up," "plugged-in," "interfacing," "projecting, " and "making contact" share referents between social processes and computer technologies. As technologies have borrowed images from social behavior to describe electronic functions, such as the "handshake" to represent a recognition between systems, human interactions are currently being described by terms borrowed from computer functions. We have become accustomed to the use of the term "interface," a description of a connection made between systems, to include human interactions--as if they were electronic systems. The human mind no longer enjoys terms of transcendence to describe its place among systems, but has become, in the words of science fiction, "wetware," a water-based version of software. Deep in quotidian usage, lie buried the perceived notions that bonds between people are forged through and across technologies. Contact, as Jody Foster plays it, happens through giant, deep-dish ears, and in outer space.

These terms for meetings and unions suggest new forms of hybridity between people and "machines" (as they were once called)--cyborgean fusions, crossings between species in transplants, genetic forms of reproduction, and the crossing between sexes, through transsexual technologies. Our ethical terror of these new forms plays out in films like Alien Resurrection, whose heroine is a clone created to provide a womb for a monstrous alien, while our hopeful outreach toward global expansion and immigration are played through narratives like E.T. and his desire for his distant home.

These computer terms and science fiction tropes not only represent our anxieties and pleasures in confronting the effects new technologies are having upon our bodily and social organization, but also serve as tropes for the economic and social processes which accompany the the global growth of new technologies. As Connie Samaras argues, in her article "Is It Tomorrow or Just the End of Time," the current craze around alien abductions and UFOs, with their narratives of abduction from the domestic space, sexual experiment, and insemination reveal contemporary anxieties around the collapse of privacy, with the coming of computers, the end of traditional forms of insemination, and the contestation of traditional gender roles and sex assignment. (210-211)

The world-wide-web describes not only an electronic, virtual space, but also the new transnational practices of labor and capital that accompany it. The role of technology in forming new unemployment and employment practices has been a key player in creating transnational patterns of immigrant labor and capital. The current craze for flying saucers and alien abductions serves to both represent and mask these new forms of labor and capital transport. As virtual systems displace certain sectors of labor, the drive to relocate within their exclusive boundaries has even encouraged one cult of website designers known as Heavenís Gate to commit mass suicide. With Nikes on their feet (a sure symbol of First World success through oppressive Third World economic practices), wearing identical clothing (to signify they were "beyond" gender), with some male bodies having been surgically altered to make sexual practice impossible, and with a little change in their pockets, the Heavenís Gate web designers killed themselves in the hope of finding permanent employment somewhere behind the fleeting material body of the Hale-Bopp comet. They were the first inter-stellar imigrants seeking work. Their example illustrates one deadly way in which changing fantasies around gender, sexuality, and technology are combining to transform lives.

Theaters of the Flesh

Growing up alongside this formation of a science fiction imaginary, is a new cultural imaginary of the body, which we might call "theaters of the flesh." Flesh, once perceived as the given envelope of nature, has now become a theater of operations.

In performance, the body once served as an expressive tool for inner, psychological processes, as in earlier Method acting, in which gestural systems were devised to reveal the emotional impact on or through the body of memory or desire. Today, the bodyís own fleshly status serves as its subject, to reveal how it is altered by, or in consonance with new technologies. Performer/filmaker Yvonne Rainer reveals her own body in her recent film, Murder and Murder, within the context of a lesbian relationship. In one shot, she sports a tuxedo jacket, which she pulls back, casually, to reveal the scars from her mastectomy. It would seem that in this instance, relational dynamics, and the erotics of viewing are compelled to account for and include in their scopic economy, the surgically altered body of a woman with breast cancer. The gender-specific regime of beauty comes into play, as well as representations of desire, caught within the context of medical technologies.

An array of such performance techniques illustrate the widespread sense of the body as its own theater of change, through technology, rather than as a register of unseen, internal motivations. Central to discussions of this new sense of the body, are the studies of the transsexual, or transgendered body, which provides a creative direction for sex assignment, resonates with the play of gender roles, and offers a site for surgical and hormonal operation. Susan Stryker, in her article, "Christine Jorgensenís Atom Bomb," situates "transsexuality as a site of technological innovation in the mid-twentieth century, [which] foregrounds the question of how technological change, particularly in the biomedical realm, impacts the conditions of embodied subjectivity." (unp. ms.) Stryker defines the transsexual body as "an operationalized surface effect achieved thorugh performative means." In other words, the flesh serves as an exteriorization--a threshold where subjectivity mixes it up with technology through performative means. Yet the transsexual body yields more than exteriority as a stage for technology, it replaces what Stryker calls "inner secrets," or the psychological, mental processes of internaltity with "internal secretions," proffering "estrogen and testosterone as deep truths of the body," rather than Freudian paradigms.

Now, one might say that theater and performance have been working to stage this encounter of body and technology since the early decades of the century. Marinetti, one of the founders of the Futurist movement, exalted the machine, as it was then known, in relation to the flesh, finally culminating in what he regarded as the transcendent arena of war. The Expressionists set up the agonies of interiority, as caught in the spotlight of authoritarian regimes of objectivity. Science was the operating room in which subjectivity was tortured by objectivist structures. Brecht founded a theater that would assimilate science and technology into a Marxist sense of materialism, compounding subjectivity and objectivism into the paradigms of labor and learning. The body performed its social relations, emphasizing their incarnation in the fleshly materiality of the body. These are but a few of the performance strategies from the earlier part of the century which em-bodied the rise of technology, up through its deadly transcendence in the two World Wars.

But let us return, for a moment, to Susan Strykerís project, which situates the transsexual body of Christine Jorgenson alongside the reception of the atomic bomb. The difference here is in the rise of notion of the virtual and its relation to structures of subjectivity. While earlier performances wrestled with machines and materiality in their staging of new arenas for subjectivity, medical technologies which could redesign sex blurred the borders between social, interior processes, and technological ones. The body as "live," bearing witness to organicist ideals and humanistic values, which the Expressionists could stage in its agonized encounter with new technologies, had been tampered with all the way down into its interiority--its hormones, and of course later, its genetic strucutre. Understood in this context, the transsexual body and transgender politics organize a body that is already deeply intermingled with virtual systems in its composition. If Brecht understood the body as a register of the social through its proximate relations onstage and its gestures, the new transgendered body has imploded the social codes of sex and gender into its very hormonal structure. Performance resides in the testosterone-induced growing of the beard, or estrogen-induced growing of the breasts--the body performs itself and its capacities in its tissues, as Jordy Jones suggests in his female-to-male performance entitled "Injectable Man."

Thus, we might imagine something like an axis of the virtual technology, running deep into the body as well as out through the internet. Following this axis, how might we reconfigure what we consider to be performance?

The Brandon Website

The Brandon website offers a virtual space, where virtual bodies "trans" gender and technology. This website has been designed to somehow perform the representations of transgender bodies as well as social violence against those bodies. Moreover, the Brandon website, as Jordy Jones explains it, creates "cyber Brandons." (http://www.banffcentre.ab.ca/~cheang now Brandon@guggenheim.org)

The name for the website is derived from the life and death of Teena Brandon, known in transgender circles as Brandon Teena. Brandon Teena was a twenty-one year-old who had lived his adolescent life as a man, making a spectacle out of his success in dating good-looking girls in small towns in the midwest. In 1993, he was brutally raped and murdered by two men who had discovered "he was a girl," as they put it. His murder prompted a national move for protection rights by several agencies, such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The name of the agency suggests some of the identity issues surrounding the case: was Brandon to be perceived as a lesbian who lived as a butch, or as a transgendered person who lived as a man? The debate hinges upon the relevance of the biological body, in considering the signs of gender.

While the website alludes to the historical evidence surrounding Brandon Teenaís death, it is not a website dedicated to Brandon Teena; rather it is a site where "multiple cyber-Brandons" appear, both in the site, and in the traversal of the site. The web designer, Shu Lea Cheang, a noted underground filmaker, created a very complex website, that links discovery, rape, murder, transsexuality and gender through difficult navigation devices--it is neither obvious nor easy how to traverse the site, nor are its significations direct in their referents. Each navigation is unique--forming a cyber-Brandon along its path.

Letís view the way in which one kind of cyber-Brandon is formed in the website, in the section called "The Big Doll."

The Big Doll, itself a secondary term of reference, provides a flashing glimpse of the techno body of the late twentieth century, constructed through the lens of transgender discourse. The cyber-Brandon animates along framed spaces like comix--those underground books of images that inform much of the visual composition on the web. However, the frames do not delineate narrative moments, but appear as fields that situate morphing. Each frame provides several orders of images that, together, constitute multiple "dolls," or compositions of identity. What makes these images cohere is a field of allusions organized by several different kinds of codes--a cyber Brandon is composed by the user who can traverse these codes and the flickering signifier the doll represents. Here we see fragments of a subcultural body marked by the practices of alternative sexualities gendering inscriptions through tattoos, scarification, and piercings; newspaper headlines around Brandon Teenaís violent death and legal proceedings; anatomical sketches, suggesting a scientistic discourse from an earlier era, and even trans-species genitals: pistils, and stamens. Traversal by the mouse animates these image morphings, and, as the user begins to put together a field of identification, through a recognition of how these body practices, this trial, and medical technologies inter-relate, a cyber-Brandon is formed, or rather, is per-formed.

There is a locational referent in this website, signified by the image of a highway. The mouse moves up the screen, following the yellow line. This section is known as "Brandonís Roadtrip." The title of the section hints at the formation of the cyber-Brandon, who "trips" through this part of the site. The traveling cyber-Brandons encounter historical transgender figures, whose images lie splattered across the highway. History as roadkill.

When clicked upon, these figures reveal Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century French hermaphrodite, discussed in the work of Foucault; Jack Garland, born the daughter of the first Mexican consul to San Francisco, in the early 20th century, who lived his life as man; and Venus Extravaganza from the film Paris is Burning. As Peggy Shaw put it, when playing a cross-gendered Stanley Kowalski in the play Belle Reprieve: " Iím so queer I donít even have to talk about it. Iím just ...parts of other people all mashed into one body...I take all these pieces and I manufacture myself...When Iím saying I fall to pieces, Iím saying Marlon Brando was not there for me, James Dean failed to come through...." (177) Like Shaw, the cyber-Brandon "trans" body is constructed through traversing the images of Herculine, Jack, and Venus. To reverse Shawís phrase, this is a process of "coming to pieces,"

In this case, the performance is in the animation of these images through the movement of the mouse, while the user actively constructs identificatory processes across the images. While the identification is formed through allusion and metonymy, both social and eccentric processes, the movement of the mouse might be perceived as a disciplined motion, controlled by the design of the images as well as that of the moouse itself. The mouse both glides freely among images, and is also choreographed by the placement of those images.

The cyber-Brandon performs, then, through a kind of dis-association between manual gesture and psychological identificatory processes. Unlike the earlier performance techniques that sought some kind of consonance between bodily gesture and internal state, the cyber Brandon is composed by the disciplined, repetitive motion of the mouse in relation to the metonymic and indirect floating, if you will, of the sign for self.

Now, this cyber-Brandon may also "play" these images in the flesh. S/he may be a practitioner of one of the bodily rites, such as piercing, or scarification, or more, inject his or her body with hormones, or more, have had a double lateral mastectomy performed on the body. (one part of the website has actual images of such an operation) If so, a certain mimesis might occur here, in the morphings. The person before the computer screen may experience something like a mirror effect, although even so, these images are nestled among other, more distant ones.

As we have seen, the Brandon website creates a cyber-body through the lens of transgender identifications. In consonance with medical technology and gender play, this body traverses the axis in its own "trans" way. As Jordy Jones observed, "new cultural life forms are beginning to appear out there." His notion of a "cultural life form" is a brilliant composite of biology, culture, and technology.

"Out there," to Jones, is on the world wide web--a new worlding device in this sense--a sense the web encourages. By referent and production, the Brandon website is international. The referent, Brandon Teena, was from the midwestern U.S. The site was first housed at the Banff Centre, an influential Canadian center of new projects which combine virtual systems and art. The website designer, Shu Lea Cheang, is a Taiwanese educated in the States, well-known for her inter-ethnic films. But more, the site is now linked to several other institutions that arrange for it to become a performance site, or rather a magnet site for performances of cultural issues linked to transgender politics. The Brandon website is now situated at the Guggenheim museum in New York, which announced Brandon as "a one year narrative project in installments." It is also linked to events located at the Dutch site, the Society for Old and New Media, and it is linked to the Harvard Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, directed by the playwright and performer, Anna Deveare Smith. Smithís organization focused on the Brandon site in its first summer of creating a dialogue between the arts and the social by organizing a multi-site public event, as it was called, on August 5, 1998 at 8 pm. The event was called "Brandonís Virtual Court System," taking place at the Harvard Law School. Using documents based on real and cyber sexual assault cases, Shu Lea Chang and the theatre director Liz Diamond created a courtroom drama. Five actors from the American Repertory Theatre played the roles, with legal scholars as jurors. In May, 1999 the Dutch site will provide the second such performance.

In other words, a performance of an international virtual "court of law" will sit in session through a website. The liberative elements of such an event are breathtaking. First-rate legal scholars will perform as a jury, while actors perform, as characters, the facts of actual cases concerning sexual assault. This virtual court may offer what the actual courts do not, in equity and understanding.

Yet, while Smithís virtual court illustrates the founding of a liberative public space, it is a space built by and through the worlding devices of transnational capital. The World Wide Web is both a colonizing and deterritorializing space, which often boasts that it "transcends" geographical boundaries, in a new, enthusiastically-embraced formation of community apart from traditional forms of territorial ownership. To some degree, as we have seen, this can be effective. However, the local is evacuated for citizenship in this "webworld," serving as what Lacan calls the "pound of flesh" that one must pay in order to enter this new form of the Symbolic. If, in Lacanian terms, castration is the price one pays in order to enter speaking and writing, this new form of the Symbolic requires "place" to be evacuated, in order to become a citizen of the "new world." As "place" is evacuated, marked bodies perform the residual effects of territory and citizenship.

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, in his article "Real Virtuality," argues that this "dissociation of space from place...of time replaced by speed" make "image and spectacle...[into] commodities, which can be consumed and disappear immediately...." In turn, their digital reproduction renders "the material base increasingly ephemeral. "(115) Yoshimoto concludes that the digital image is becoming the basic commodity in the global economy. (116)

What is in important to our consideration today is how this transnational space organizes around the discourses of gender and sex for its representation. In its most liberative sense, it creates cyber-bodies who "trans" restrictive social boundaries in their very composition. While, at the same time, marked bodies perform the residual effects of territory and citizenship. But this deployment of the discourse of sex also is of use to the formation of transnational corporations, who must invent a new sense of territory and identity for their labor and commercial profits.

Neferti Tadiar, in her article "Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community," argues that new labor and commodity markets are being formed through what she terms a global sexual fantasy. Tadiar explains that new transnational "economies and political relations of nations are libidinally configured, that is, they are grasped in terms of sexuality." (183) This desire is specifically heterosexual in its mode, enacted according to what Tadiar refers to as the prevailing mode of heterosexual relations." (186)

Turning specifically to the Asia-Pacific region, Tadiar notes that it began as a threat to the global power of the U.S. with the struggles of the Vietnam War, followed by economic growth and practices that threatened to make the region more independent and powerful. Thus, a new dream of the region was required to transform it into a transnational pool of capital. The new dream was formed through a sexualized representation of a "marriage" brokered between the United States and Japan, with, in the licit relations, Japan as wife, and the U.S. as husband. (185-6) Yet within the Asia Pacific region, asserts Tadiar, Japan encouraged a performance of illicit relations, in which Japan plays male John (emulating some occupational practices of American soldiers in the region) to the poorer countries. The relations play through the image and the reality of the prostitute. As evidence, Tadiar lists the 100,000 Asian migrant women who enter Japan each year to work as "entertainers in the booming sex industry." 90 percent of them come from the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan. (198)

Alongside this material practice, which sexualizes economic power and makes underdeveloped nations into "hostesses," the labor conditions of women in free trade zones are constructed as a sexual masquerade. The work camps in the economic zones emulate the conditions of a brothel, where women (and only women) are forced to live where they work, putting in 60-80 hour weeks for little money. Tadiar concludes that the transnational zone is formed "Not so much [by] nations acting like people, but [by] people embodying nations." (204) Deterritorialization finds a new ground in gendered bodies, which offers them up to transnational uses through scenarios of seduction and sexual practice.

- Tadiarís article visualizes the body in the transnational zone as a heterosexualized version of the elements. "Trans" remains outside the body of stable gender, preying upon it, or using it to em-body the sexualization of nations. The heterosexualized body differs in its effect from the trans-gendered body, in which the "trans" lies deep in the hormonal structuring, with virtual or cyber deterritorialization both within the body and the body within it.

To briefly conclude: I have moved through two paradigms, beginning with transgender identifications and medical practices, caught up in the new transnational, virtual space of a website; to sexualizing discourses of the transnational as licit and illicit heterosexual, stable gender discourse.

Two trends emerge: sexual and gender liberation movements can find strength in an international arena, but it also seems that transnational capital cannot constitute a new space for its operations without relying upon the discourses of gender and sexuality to accomplish its feat.

I have attempted to illustrate, briefly, how transnational practices, represented as gendered and sexual and gender and sexual practices, represented as global intertwine to form a new foundational imaginary for the late 20th century. New forms of capital, which deterritorialize the national, encourage new forms of embodiment. It is a very complex world wide web of associations that encourages a new global fantasy as sexual.

Given these conditions of representation and deterritorialization, I would argue that only through a combination of the sexual critique and the transnational, can we begin to perceive just how this new foundational global fantasy is being constructed. And may provide a way to be performers in its construction, rather than simply its audience. As Anna Deveare Smith points out, current political discussions on TV donít even provide the public with a laugh-track--some sound that represents their participation in the process. We might try to imagine our own uses of this interface--uses that benefit something other than transnational capital.

Works Cited:

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong.

Belle Reprieve, in Split Britches: Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla. "Bodies in Motion:Lesbian and Transsexual Histories," in A Queer World. Ed. Martin Duberman. 134-152.

Dionysus in ë69. Ed. Richard Schechner. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

"ëDonít Call Me Girlí: Lesbian Theory, Feminist Theory, and Transsexual Identities," in Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance. Ed. Dana Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 169-185.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, "Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community," What is in a Rim? Ed. Arif Dirlik. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. 183-210.

Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. "Real Virtuality," Global/Local. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 107-118.